The first product in the SUMO family was built for the PC game, League of Legends. It helped players of the game to evaluate their gaming skills, get in-game guidance and analytics for their last matches.

All of the insights were generated by analyzing the raw data coming from the game developer´s api and subsequently communicated in an easy-to-grasp way to the user.

This concept was so well perceived by the target audience that the app was successfully monetized and further iteration of this concept was put into development for another popular game—DOTA 2.

Unlike League of Legends, DOTA 2 offered much less lenience in the way of data accessibility, which lead to the beginning of a system of split-testing across the SUMO product family. This allowed us to release different feature sets that addressed various complexities in the development process and, from this, we learned many best practices that benefitted the entire family of products.

After further definition and fine-tuning of the design language we were able to quickly realize similar products with different features but the same look and feel.

The third product and probably the one with the deepest data insights from our side, was built for a rising star in the gaming community—Overwatch.

As the sole Designer for this product—and supporting resource for the older family products—there was a lot to learn about clear documentation, unification and information architecture so that the user experience could be kept as unified as possible.

Tons of brain power, dedication and time went into this product and labor of love. Fortunately enough, the users were loving it so much, that we went for another monetization round, since the visual execution of the first one (LOLSUMO) was also done by me.

We extended our previous marketing efforts and developed a dedicated website that introduced the product and its benefits in a crisp and clear fashion. Additional buzz was created with an introduction video (also at the bottom of this page) and tons of Youtube-based influencer marketing campains.

The app itself got a dedicated upselling page where a lot of explanation and justification needed to happen since we went for a more aggressive price point to target the Tier A markets that dominated our product´s users.

We also went for a paywall approach that "locked" the most valuable and freshly introduced features that were specifically focussed on a data-based deepdive behind various upsell overlays (besides the usual ad removal service of course).

Our biggest issues for this product family lie in mainly two areas: the time-consuming development of a third party game app whose game then also needed an unusually long live-cycle AND the fact that gaming data still is owned by the game developer itself and is,therefore, a seldomly shared good.

Both factors lead to the decision to slowly but steadily drop the SUMO product family into maintenance mode, stop feature development and instead focus on a more shallow but wider horizonal platform approach. 

This platform pivot idea required a lot of refocussing as well as brand- and user-adapting thought processes and workshops. The result can currently be seen in the Zack.ai portfolio page.

For a better introduction into the basic idea behind OVERSUMO´s stats-based coaching, please enjoy this draft of a marketing video created with the assistance of an external agency.